When your new boss Googles you: Do you need a reputation management firm?

The team is camped out in the company's sixth-floor conference room, all eyes trained on a large flat-screen TV mounted on the lime-green wall. On the screen is a scrolling Twitter feed filled with photos of a muscular, tattooed gentleman posing in various strategically positioned outfits a metal-studded leather harness, snug-fitting underpants, precipitously drooping boxer shorts.

Brian Patterson, the young guy in jeans and a button-down shirt who is piloting the onscreen images via Macbook, shakes his head. "This Twitter account is really rough," he says. "This is not doing him any favors."

The "him" Patterson refers to is a graduate student, one who will soon enter a competitive job market where prospective employers will almost certainly Google his name before setting up an interview. At the moment, an online search would lead to a few undesirable results, including this Twitter account and its vivid portraits of male anatomy. So the student has sought the services of Patterson and his colleagues at Go Fish Digital, an online reputation management agency based in McLean, Virginia, in the hopes that a professional online makeover might make him a more attractive job candidate.

This kind of digital service, offered by a multitude of companies across the country, has long been favored by celebrities, corporations and other high-profile clientele; since Go Fish Digital was founded nearly a decade ago, these high-dollar accounts have made up the vast majority of the agency's business. But as graduation approaches each spring, Patterson and his team also see a surge of students and graduates who contact the company looking for help triple the usual number, though the company, for proprietary reasons, won't offer a precise tally.

This is what a professional online reputation management "campaign" looks like: four people one patched in via video around a conference room table, jotting notes on laptops, carefully examining every trace of a client's digital existence and plotting a strategy to improve it. Their goal is twofold: stop the bleeding, then apply polish.

On a large whiteboard beside the wall-mounted screen, a to-do list for this client is growing, with the obvious scrawled in bold blue marker: "TWITTER DELETE."

But Kat Haselkorn, the company's social media guru, argues on behalf of saving the account itself, because of its high placement among the client's search results.

"It makes more sense to just delete the tweets and start from scratch," she says. "Let's get him to retweet things that matter . . . so if people click on it, they see his brilliant insights, not pictures of guys chained up."

"None of this is a secret," says Mike Moriarty, a partner and marketing director at Go Fish Digital. The agency has published basic instructions for online reputation management, including how to build positive content and push negative links off the first page of search results; how to find your Google "autocomplete values" to learn what search terms are commonly paired with your name (i.e., "Justin Bieber racist joke" or "Joe Biden gaffes"); and how to take control of your "personal brand" by registering domain names and building profiles on social media and professional sites.

The company also offers tips on what not to do. For instance, when people find something mortifying about themselves online, they tend to search for it over and over. That's bad, and not just for one's sanity and self-esteem: Those repeated searches and clicks tell Google that the link in question is important, says Daniel Russell, a new business associate with Go Fish Digital.

"If there's something bad out there, the first thing to do is to stop looking at it," he says.

Where students are concerned, Moriarty says, the company often offers its services at a steeply discounted rate in rare cases, for free.

"We take mercy on some graduates," Moriarty says, noting that reputation management services for individuals starts at about $1,000 per month. "Not everyone can afford this, and we'll tell them what to do. But sometimes they see that and they think, oh, good, you know what you're talking about! I'll hire you to do it."

The team's current client, whose search results remain displayed on the big screen, is in fairly good shape, despite the graphic Twitter account. He shows no measurable results on Google Trends, meaning that he's not a hot search topic online. No one has linked to the opinion piece that he wants to remove from a student website. His autocomplete values are benign. By building positive profiles on sites such as LinkedIn and Quora, he can make that all-important first page of search results shine. The prognosis is good.

Students don't have the digital footprint of a corporate brand, and their problems are rarely irreversible. "They're not Exxon Mobil," Russell says. "There's still hope."

"Well, unless they really screwed up," Patterson says.

"But even then, sometimes you can turn it around," Moriarty says. "What was the name of that sorority girl? The one who wrote that crazy e-mail to her sorority sisters?"

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